This is quite good! But we all know that starting to install things and modifying such a system can cause trouble.

Now, there is a tool called Crouton that allows us to install a Linux system (Debian or Ubuntu) into a chroot. We can even run X if we want. So, I would say that for doing development work on your Chromebook you have (at least) 5 options:

Install things directly in ChromeOS

Crouton: command line tools only

Crouton: xiwi – run X and (for example) XFCE inside a ChromeOS window

Crouton: X – run X side by side with ChromeOS

Get rid of ChromeOS and install (for example) Arch instead

I will explore some of the options.

#2. Crouton command line tools only
For the time being, I don’t really need X and a Window Manager. I am fine (I think) with the ChromeOS UI and UX. After downloading crouton I ran:

sudo sh ./crouton -n deb-cli -r stretch -t cli-extra

This gave me a Debian Stretch system without X, named deb-cli (in case I want to have other chroots in the future). Installation took a few minutes.

To access Debian I now need to

CTRL-ALT-T : to get a crosh shell

crosh> shell : to get a ChromeOS unix shell

$ sudo startcli : to get a shell in my Debian strech system

This is clearly a sub-optimal solution to get a shell tab (and closing the shell takes 3x exit). However, it works very well. I installed Node.js (for ARMv8) and in a few minutes I had cloned my git nodejs-project, installed npm packages, run everything and even pushed some code. I ran a web server on 127.0.0.1 and I could access it from the browser just as expected (so this is much more smooth than a virtual machine).

For my purposes I think this is good enough. I am not very tempted to get X up an running side-by-side with ChromeOS. However I obviously would like things like shortcuts and virtual desktops.

Actually, I think a chroot is quite good. It does not modify the base system the way package managers for OS X tend to do. I don’t need to mess with PATH and other variables. And I get a more complete Debian system compared to just the package manager. And it is actually the real Debian packages I install.

I installed Secure Shell and Crosh Window allowing me to change some defaults parameters of the terminal (by hitting CTRL-SHIFT-P), so at least I dont need to adjust the font size for every terminal.

#4. Crouton with XFCE
Well, this is going so good that I decided to try XFCE as well.

sudo sh ./crouton -n deb-xfce -r stretch -t xfce,extensions

It takes a while to install, but when done just run:

sudo startxfce4

The result is actually pretty nice. You switch between ChromeOS and XFCE with CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-BACK/FORWARD (the buttons next to ESC). The switching is a little slow, but it gives you a (quite needed) virtual desktop. Install crouton extensions in ChromeOS to allow copy-paste. A good thing is that I can run:

sudo enter-chroot -n deb-xfce

to enter my xfce-chroot without starting X and XFCE. So, for practical purposes I can have an X-chroot but I dont need to start X if I dont want to.

Performance
I have written about NUC vs RPi before and to be honest I was worried that my ARM Chromebook would more have the poor performance of the RPi than the decent performance of the NUC. I would say this is not a problem, the Acer R13 is generally fast enough.

After a few Nodejs tests, it seems the Acer Chromebook R13 is about 5-6 times faster than an RPi V2.